


IP

by tcrobson



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe, Between Seasons/Series, Other, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 02:05:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8126227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tcrobson/pseuds/tcrobson
Summary: An unfinished multi-chapter fic for one of my favorite shows. I really liked this first chapter, but I never continued the story, especially when season 2 led the show and characters in such a different direction. But I loved the writing too much on this chapter to just scrap it, so here it is!





	

Gordon felt like he had seen a ghost.

With all the fervor of the Cardiff Giant now settled down, its sales maintaining a steady pace, the sudden disappearance of its greatest proponent and unexpected enemy was an issue stashed away at the far back of people’s memory banks. The results of his work remained for now — only one new programmer had thus far been hired to replace the several that had scarpered with programmer Cameron Howe — but the once-dry imaginations of the skeletal PC division were beginning to earn their keep, with reasonably unique ideas and innovations peppering the once-empty dry erase board. Hell, once senior VP John Bosworth had drowned the experiences in a bourbon bottle enough for him to stay relatively sane, he hired a junior product manager, Morgan Earhart, at Gordon’s request to help the next Cardiff computer gain its footing. With Earhart using her past programming experience and breezy disposition to make the overworked staff as productive and comfortable as possible, Gordon, for the first time in a while, felt steady in his career and happy with his life.

Until the specter of his nightmares walked in.

Macmillan was a little less polished than his past self — his shirt wasn’t pressed, his head of hair a little longer and less coifed, his once-smug face hidden behind a dark beard — but that nearly imperceptible glint in his eyes was the same…at least at first. Upon recognizing Gordon’s glasses-magnified brown eyes, his usual charming demeanor weakened, almost to cowering. Joe lowered his eyes and quickly turned to John’s office, quietly clicking the door closed.

That tug of fear Gordon felt — the lingering possibility that this contentment he had would be snatched away by the smooth-talking sociopath — was a nightmare he was now only woken in the night by maybe once every week or two. But that fear began to abate, because the phantom he met eyes with was not the traitor who left Cardiff.

This man, whoever he was, was haunted himself.

 

* * *

 

Gordon entered the Kill Room.

“I need to talk to Morgan.”

A programmer, standing beside Morgan at the whiteboard, where they were pouring over a muddle of code and calculations, noted Gordon’s concerned tone and promptly left, shutting the door behind him.

“What is it, Gordon?”

Gordon hesitated, paced the floor a bit.

“Before you were here, before I was made senior product manager, in my place was-“

“-Joe Macmillan. Gordon, you’ve told me all this before. What’s going on?”

He didn’t want to say it. Maybe if it remained unsaid, it was just his imagination. Saying it out loud made it real.

“He’s in Bosworth’s office now.”

“He came back? After everything he did? Why would he do that?” she asked, more to herself than to Gordon.

“I don’t know, but it’s not good. His being here is not good. I mean, we’re going good with this one, it’s not that far along, but…he can’t do this, he can’t just suddenly-“

Morgan put her hand on Gordon’s shoulder.

“ _Easy_ , Gordon, easy. Everything will be okay. You really think Bosworth would let him back into this dog park without a tight leash? I doubt he’d let him in at all. He could just be finalizing his resignation, we don’t know. Just relax, and breathe.” She patted him on the shoulder. “We’ve got this.”

Gordon always felt better after talking to Morgan. She was a good complement to him here at Cardiff — his weaknesses were her strengths. But though she could sell product as slickly and confidently as Joe could, she was a supportive force, bent on the programmers getting the credit and respect they deserved. She motivated the team, encouraged them, and often wrote code alongside them to help keep the machine’s progress on track, but she also understood that they were all human, with lives, needs, and dreams beyond a computer terminal.

Morgan was what Joe should have been.

Gordon nodded and smiled, a clenching in his gut releasing.

John suddenly opened the door and peered in.

“You two, my office, now.” 

There wasn’t a hint of the usual South Texas charm in his voice.

The clenching in Gordon’s stomach returned at breakneck speed. Reluctantly, he followed John out, with Morgan, back to contemplating the whiteboard’s contents, trailing behind.

Upon entry into John’s office, Gordon’s limbs seized when he saw Joe seated before the desk. He slowly stepped inward, bracing himself to meet gazes with his ghost again. 

Morgan paced intently over to the desk and scooped up a pen and writing tablet. Without giving the unusual visitor a second glance, she turned and seated herself on the couch, urgently etching ideas and snippets of code that would eventually find their home on the whiteboard in the previous room.

John sat at his desk and leaned back in his chair.

“You’ll be under these two if we do this, so it’s their ballgame what you can and can’t do.”

Gordon froze. “You…you can’t seriously be considering bringing him back on?”

“He’s good at what he does...” John resigned.

“He screwed us over, he screwed you over! If you bring him back on, he’ll destroy everything we’re working to rebuild!”

“Gordon…”

“I can’t allow him-”

“Well, it’s not solely your choice, is it, son?”

The silence thickened in a split second. Gordon internally flared with a torrid anger. Morgan wasn’t there, he could understand her naiveté, but John was at the helm of Macmillan’s destructive wave. Had memory begun to fail him so soon?

“What do you mean? I’m the senior product manager,” squeaked Gordon, who tried to emote superiority, but was betrayed by his tight throat.

“By inheritance and seniority only. Morgan’s the one keeping your head above water — hell, she’s here because you couldn’t handle everything on your plate, you said so yourself. _She’s_ the one keeping the programmers on track, _she’s_ the one keeping the investors happy. Hell’s bells, _she’s_ the one picking up the back-end programming that isn’t gettin’ done because we’re too shorthanded!”

This couldn’t be happening. This had to be another nightmare. Gordon felt the world’s weight begin to crush him into the ground; his knees started to tremble because of it.

Gordon was trying — he had been handed a lot in Joe’s wake, and it seemed like the PC division was restructuring well under his tutelage. He never considered that, maybe, that peace of mind he had wasn’t because he was handling it all well…it was because he wasn’t handling any of it _at all_.

“You’re too close to this, Gordon – Morgan can stay objective about this, she wasn’t here when all this happened. As far as I’m concerned, you two have switched positions. I’m leaving it to her, because it’ll be _her_ baby-sitting the two of _you_ ,” finished John, pointing at Gordon and Joe. 

Joe took a deep breath, preparing to interject, but John quickly stopped him with “You, be quiet.” 

Then all eyes turned to the franticly etching Morgan.

“Now don’t be mute over there, Earhart.”

Morgan’s eyes never wavered from her task on paper.

“He stays out of development. Senior sales associate, nothing more now. We can use him for investors and consumers, but we don’t need him influencing output and design. I can bring him as SC on the Robertson pitch, not an assured investment like Stanley-Harper, so we can make sure he can still be the faceless salesman with the slick tongue we need him to be. It’ll do us no good to have someone on board whose reputation precedes him.”

She never met Joe’s probing, assessing eyes. She knew better.

“Good point. Agreed, Macmillan?” asked John with a punctuated grunt. 

Joe and John’s eyes met. However brief the moment was, it told John everything he needed to know.

This man sitting before him left Cardiff to search for a part of himself he knew he had lost, an explanation for the things he did. 

Dark circles beneath his sleepless, red-rimmed eyes.

Once-charming laugh lines sacrificed to the inescapable torture of age.

A permanent sorrow in his eyes, with no deceptive shadow to hide the secrets buried within them.

Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find. So he came back here…because he had no place else to go.

Joe cleared his throat.

“Agreed.”

Joe and John stood and shook hands. Mid-grip, John remarked under his breath, “You won’t get a third chance, so don’t screw this up.” Joe’s eyes flashed with something he’d never want to show to the others — perhaps it was fear, disappointment, submission. Whatever it was, Joe quickly wiped it away and stood his full six-foot, five-inch height in confidence.

Morgan rose, tore off the top page of the legal pad, and returned the tablet to John’s desk along with his pen. With her mind on work, she headed for the door.

“When will the pitch to Robertson be?” asked Joe to anyone who held the answer.

As she left out the door without so much as a peek backwards, Morgan sternly replied, “Thursday. I’ll find you.”

Joe promptly followed Morgan out the door and down the hall.

“Wait - what is it we’re selling? I can’t pitch something I know nothing about, Morgan…”

Morgan quickly slotted in the Kill Room’s door and exited, having replaced her notes with a twenty-page printed primer. She quickly closed the door behind her before Joe could make entrance.

“Here’s the overview of what we’re developing. Learn it inside and out, and formulate the best way to pitch it. I’ll see you Thursday.”

Morgan closed the distance between herself and Joe, almost unintentionally emphasizing their near-foot height difference, and, for the first time since their introduction, locked her green eyes with his. 

“And you call me Miss Earhart, or ma’am. You are not my friend. You are beneath me. You have a _long_ way to go before you earn that kind of respect around here again, so you had better start now.”

Morgan turned and walked away.

Joe looked down at the primer in his hands.

The top page read “CARDIFF FALCON - Take flight.”

 

* * *

  
  
Joe slapped the primer on the table in the Kill Room, startling Morgan and Gordon.

“I can’t pitch this! There’s nothing here! A faster processor is not _nearly_ enough to compete!”

“Get out,” warned Gordon.

“Apple’s GUI will probably be the standard when this comes out - if we stick with the same old formula-“

Morgan had been waiting for this very conversation.

“-You think we’re not trying, Macmillan? We want Cardiff on the top shelf, the latest in consumer technology, the go-to personal computer for every household in the U.S. But guess what? Because of _your_ leadership, we’re just trying to break even! Yeah, I’d love to give it the 16-bit Motorola chip, a GUI, a bloody CD-ROM, but the money we’re getting from investors is the only thing keeping this from being a lost cause! It’s almost not even a Cardiff product anymore!”

“It doesn’t have to be a lost cause - we can do this, we can keep up-“

“Who’s ‘we’, Joe? We don’t have anyone left!”

He was about to counter, but he stopped himself. She was right, he knew she was. He could argue her with any number of ifs and buts, but Cardiff’s current state was because of him and everything he did. That truth wouldn’t change.

“You take what I gave you and form a pitch that makes it sound like the next best thing these people need in their offices and on their desks. That is your job, and _only_ that. So do it,” Morgan finished.

After a brief hesitation, Joe picked up the primer and headed for the door, Morgan following behind. Before she closed him out, he looked back, meeting Morgan’s eyes, and was surprised by why he saw in them.

Fear.


End file.
